Ex-academic, current tech monkey by day & speedrunner by night


bluesky
leggystarscream.bsky.social
discord
@leggystarscream

lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

ok. here's the pitch.

you know minesweeper? yeah. and that trend of minesweeper variants kicked off by hexcells, i'm gonna say, based on nothing?

imagine if you didn't have to play minesweeper.

imagine if you couldn't play minesweeper.

imagine if you taught the game to play itself.

bombe is a game reminiscent of the older zachtronics tradition, where the game made no attempt to hide that it was just fucking programming, except that bombe is tilted more towards the mathematical.

it takes the clues and creates "regions" of cells — if you play regular ol' square-cell minesweeper and see a 5, then that means there are 5 bombs in the eight surrounding cells, so bombe makes a "region" out of those eight cells and slaps a 5 clue on it. when a cell is revealed, it's removed from all its regions; if that cell was a mine, all the regions it's in are decremented, so the clues always correctly reflect the state of the board.

the first thing you have to teach bombe is that if a region has a 0 clue, none of its cells contain mines.

the second thing you have to teach bombe is that if a region has a 1 clue, and there is only 1 cell in that region, that cell is a mine.

then you get a 1 clue completely contained within a larger 1 clue.

then you get a 1 clue that partially overlaps a six-cell 5 clue.

and then it becomes completely unhinged.

you can never be wrong. bombe has a whole fucking logic prover in there somewhere and will never let you create rules that aren't airtight. no, the problem isn't in creating rules that are correct, but that are useful. you can see above that my colossal set of rules (nearing 300 at this point) is generating tons of extra information, but none of it is actually uncovering anything on the fucking board.

you can ask bombe for a "hint" (both good and useful to do, not a source of shame like most puzzle games), and it will find for you a handful of cells that you could make a deduction about and the specific regions that will lead to that deduction. but past a certain point, even that isn't enough. even if you give up on being clever and decide to just create a hyper-specific rule for every situation that comes up, it's still not enough. because some puzzles require a deduction that involves a chain of five or more regions, and you can't make rules that involve more than four regions. so even if you know what the next step would be, that doesn't help you. because like i said, you can't actually play minesweeper here. you can't just click a cell. you have to make a rule. so you have to figure out how to reduce the deduction to something simpler. and that is very difficult.

and in case that's not enough, there are other modes you can play that place different restrictions on the rules you can make. i am losing my mind. i think about set theory all the time now. i can see infinity.

it's great. i've had a few sleepless nights and that makes me barely functional the next day so i ended up playing like 30 hours of this in the three days since i bought it. i'm just barely ahead of @chaoticiak on several leaderboards though which i consider an accomplishment

also the game is ugly as hell. i didn't want to show the UI above because it's technically a spoiler (most of it unlocks as you make progress), but it is clearly someone just fucking slapping sprites around in SDL or something i don't know. truly ghastly. i've come to love it. feel free to ask anyone what the hell anything is because that's completely legit, half the game doesn't explain itself at all



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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

oh god thanks for reminding me. bombe is a great idea for a game and i enjoyed my time with it (although i'm currently on hiatus since i'm doing a lot of other things too)

i think i approached the game a bit differently, because i much prefer rules that i can understand. a lot of my rules are aimed more about being logical / understandable / elegant (i have a document in the game's discord server that lists every single rule in my ruleset and my justification for including it), which is pretty good to hit a lot of the levels, although it means it's hard to peck off the last few levels that require specific rules. and it also means it's very hard for me to make more progress, since i want to actually understand rules i'm putting in, and it's getting harder to do that. but still, incredible game, well worth the time and money i had

also yeah the UI is heinous and i wish there are some improvements, but it's usable at least

oh i'm certainly trying to make rules that are sensible, but yeah i really wish i could... name rules or something. in trying to deal with the more complex conditions i feel like i've lost track of what my coverage is, so it's been a lot tougher to figure out where the blind spots are and what needs some touching up

i wish i could more easily go back and revisit puzzles that took too long to solve too. maybe it's time to do a reset with the robots set to like 200 or so

i've been marking rules that are real stinkers as lowest priority so i could also try disabling all of those

back when i was active (around half a year ago), rule management was a highly requested feature. i think you can at least give symbols to rules now? but part of why i made a document was to sort my rules and name them. unfortunate that it's not a built-in feature for sure. i do think you're even expected to have some notes outside the game to figure things out

also yeah the game will absolutely want you to reset every so often, as you build new knowledge and realize your old rules are inefficient and you want to compact them more. most notable when you unlock variables; all that "1-bomb in 1-cell must be all bombs, 2-bomb in 2-cell must be all bombs, 3-bomb in 3-cell must be all bombs, ..."? make them a single rule "X-bomb in X-cell must be all bombs". and then you'll find even more uses of variables and eventually think, yeah, starting over with a clean slate of rules is probably better.

i did try to keep them at least roughly grouped for a while but past a few screenfuls of rules it takes ages just to reorder them, and you can't move more than one at a time, and you can't filter by "all rules containing a !", and urggggh

i'm aggressively disabling a few stinker rules right now to see how that affects things. maybe i can clean this up without completely nuking what i've got. i did also start on 60-rule mode in an attempt to make a cleaner set, and it's gone okay but i don't have anywhere near a good sense of how to solve the whole game in that few rules yet

i believe you can ctrl+click rules to select multiple (helpful for exporting rules to clipboard) but i'm not sure if you can move them, and just yeah the rules page is kinda wonky

also you're not going to solve the whole game with the restrictions (especially triangles and infinity) although some people are crazy enough and manage to come close. personally i don't consider pecking off the last few levels to be that important; even the steam achievements only go up to 5500 solved in each shape

I've lost the last few months of my life to Bombe; incredible hell game, my personal Amigara Fault. I'm currently at the point of wanting to write an external rule editor and ruleset manager, so I'm instead trying to take a break and play anything else ...but I just messed up my sleep tonight doing weekly puzzles. :yeah:

I'm playing the demo and I was astonished to realize that I recognized the sounds - I hadn't realized this was the same developer as Infinite Turtles! I really recommend that game, if you haven't played it. It's like...little conveyor belt computer puzzles with recursion as a central mechanic.